Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/54

 Against the Czech aspirations is to be set, not only the matter of fact that Slovakia is by no means Czechia, but also the fact that at any rate a great majority of the Slovaks—in spite of the most furious instigation—do not at all wish to become Czechish, but desire an independent Slovak Republic, whose Government was, already constituted. As regards historical grounds, there is no precise relation at all between Slovakia and Czechia. It would be the wildest anachronism to go back hundreds of years; but the best of it is that such a going back—finds nothing in favour of the Czech claims.

The Roumanians did as the Czechs and as the Servians, and, in the name of national freedom and of interim occupations for the maintenance of order, the wildest national oppression was inaugurated. Frankly Magyar territory was occupied, a tyranny against these absolute majorities introduced. Hungarian newspapers forbidden, their importation stopped, and in the crassest contradiction to the clearest conditions of the armistice, a violent abrogation of the Magyar administrative authorities took place, which could not then but lead to unrest.

In Budapest these news arrived ever more inopportunely, and the voice of the capital and of the country became critical. Kàrolyi's Government had to threaten to dissolve and to hand over everything to the lovers of force; for the restraining of the rising fury of the people seemed to be growing well nigh impossible.

Brute force undisguised, scorn, derision, abuse, hailed upon the young Hungary, attacked for hoer past, although no land can more thoroughly expiate the sins of the past, and even herself judge them, than Hungary.

I had an opportunity in Budapest of studying at close quarters all questions of detail, and a residence of ten years in various states of the once Monarchy affords me the possibility of clear personal judgment. I hold, then, that the uncontested cultural superiority of the Magyars as compared with most of the minority nationalities—there were majorities in Hungary only in tho local sense, not on the whole—this superiority which by itself fashioned the Revolution, though the impulse to its explosion must have been given